Monday, July 14, 2008
Club Cooler
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Cranium Cooler
Does your hat’s hot sweaty headband press against your forehead and cause you to overheat on a scorching summer day? Are you tired of wearing plain old hats that offer only shade or perhaps respite from a bad hair day? Well hang onto your hats folks because summer heat relief is on its way! The new Cranium Cooler offers soothing heat relief by converting solar energy into a very cool forehead chiller. The concept is really quite simple.
The solar cells on the hat gather the sun’s energy. This energy is transferred to a Peltier-effect thermoelectric device that cools the wearer’s forehead. A little radiator is mounted on the front to dissipate excess heat. Deep down we actually like this invention’s concept. But, unless you dangle lots of little furry balls from the brim and become a Flamenco Dancer, we’re afraid the Fashion Police will be issuing citations.Saturday, July 12, 2008
European vs. American mobile phone use
In last week's post about Palm's phone plans, I made a passing comment about the right way to display your mobile phone at dinner in Europe. It turned out to be the most popular part of the post, and produced a couple of requests that I say more comparing European and American attitudes toward mobile phones. I don't pretend to the world's expert on the subject, but I'll summarize what I've seen. Here goes:
In the US, a cellphone is a tool. In Europe, a mobile phone is a lifestyle.
I guess I ought to give a few details. Let me start with a disclaimer: It's very dangerous to talk about "Europeans" as if they're some sort of unified cultural group. Europe is a continent of many nationalities, and each one has a different culture and history. National regulations on phones also differ dramatically within Europe, which has an important impact on mobile use.
I saw a good example of this in the responses to my last post. I said all Europeans put their mobile phones on the table during a meal. I got replies from some countries agreeing with me, and others saying I was completely wrong. It turns out the table thing differs from country to country.
It's only slightly less hazardous to talk about a "typical" American mobile phone user. The culture in the US is more uniform than it is in Europe, but there are profound differences between various market segments. The average 16-year-old in the US views a mobile phone very differently than the average 40-year-old. (Come to think of it, I suspect average 40-year-old mobile users in Berlin and Chicago probably have more in common with each other than either of them have with the 16-year-old.)
Now that I've hedged thoroughly, here are those details:
Vocabulary
The differences start with the words we use to talk about the industry. In Europe, a mobile phone is usually called (in English-speaking countries) a "mobile." As in, "I'll ring your mobile." In the US, mobile phones are most often called "cellphones," and that's sometimes shortened: "I'll call your cell."
The term differs in other European countries, of course (for example, Hermann on Brighthand says the term in Germany is "handy.") I do know that if you say "cellphone" pretty much anywhere in Europe, people will look at you like you're a dork. Found that out the hard way.
Occasionally young people in the US use the term "mobile," but it's not very widespread. I try to use the term "mobile phone" in this website because it's understood on both continents.
There are also differences in the terms used to describe the companies that sell mobile phone services. In the US they are generally called "carriers." But the second easiest way to piss off a European mobile exec is to call his or her company a carrier. They are "operators." As the distinction was explained to me, an operator actively runs a network, while a carrier merely delivers something passively.
(In case you're wondering, the first easiest way to piss off a European mobile exec is to ask how his MMS revenues are doing.)
The operator vs. carrier thing is very confusing in the US, because to most Americans an "operator" is a person who runs a switchboard. The archetypal operator is Ernestine, a character created by actress Lily Tomlin. She snorted annoyingly, was rude, and reveled in her ability to manipulate customers:
"Here at the Phone Company we handle eighty-four billion calls a year. Serving everyone from presidents and kings to scum of the earth. (snort) We realize that every so often you can't get an operator, for no apparent reason your phone goes out of order [snatches plug out of switchboard], or perhaps you get charged for a call you didn't make. We don't care. Watch this [bangs on a switch panel like a cheap piano] just lost Peoria. (snort) You see, this phone system consists of a multibillion-dollar matrix of space-age technology that is so sophisticated, even we can't handle it. But that's your problem, isn't it? Next time you complain about your phone service, why don't you try using two Dixie cups with a string. We don't care. We don't have to. (snort) We're the Phone Company!"
–Ernestine
Some people might say that's a good metaphor for a mobile phone company, but it's hard for an American to understand why any company would want to apply the term to itself.
The mobile phone culture
To me, one of the most pronounced differences between mobile use in the US and Europe is that Europe has a more developed mobile phone culture. There are huge variations in attitude from person to person, but on average, people in Europe expect the mobile to play a more prominent, recognized role in the structure of society, and many people look to the mobile as a central source of new innovations. The belief is almost that the mobile phone has a manifest destiny to subsume everything else. This love affair with the mobile phone is far more common in Europe than it is in America.
You can find a good example of this attitude in an essay about the future, on the website of the Club of Amsterdam, a think tank based in the Netherlands:
"Every machine will be a mobile phone, talking to their owner but mainly to other machines.... In 2020 the world is one big video screen, one big video camera, one big mobile phone.... The mobile will act as a "trust machine". It will be our most important lifestyle instrument. It will probably be decomposed with its core elements scattered all over and inside our body."
People in the US can be just as enthusiastic about mobilizing technology, but they often think in terms of shrinking and mobilizing the PC and Internet, rather than growing the cellphone. In the US, the cellphone is often viewed as a necessary tool rather than something to love. For example, an MIT survey in 2004 found that Americans rated the cellphone number one in the list of inventions they hate but can't live without, edging out the dreaded alarm clock.
If you're still having trouble picturing the difference in attitudes, look at it this way – many people in Europe feel about their mobiles the way that Californians feel about their cars.
Okay? Got it now?
The European love of the mobile phone has several facets to it...
Fashion. To many people in Europe, their mobile phone seems to be a fashion statement. It says something about you, much like your clothing. Americans also care about the look of their phones (just take a look at my daughter's Razr, covered in stick-on jewels and shiny dangling beady things). But in general I don't think Americans identify with the phone as deeply.
It seems much more common for someone in Europe to change phones than it is for someone in the US. All phones in Europe are GSM, and people generally understand that you can pop out your SIM card and pop it into a new phone anytime you want. The mobile is just a skin that you wrap around your phone contract. Major retail chains, like Carphone Warehouse, sell large numbers of mobile phones independent of any operator.
Although you can do the same sort of phone swap in the US if you have a GSM phone, it seems like relatively few people do it, and very few phones are sold outside of the carriers' stores. I'm not sure why. I think awareness of the capability is lower (I'll bet a majority of American GSM users couldn't even find their SIM card). And of course many mobile phone users in the US are on CDMA, forcing them to go through the carrier if they want to switch phones. But also, I think there's just less desire to constantly update your phone in the US, because people don't pay as much attention to it.
Design. This is related to the fashion topic, but it deserves a separate discussion because it's so surprising, at least to me. In most consumer goods, there's an approximate consensus on design between the US and Europe. You can find exceptions, but in general clothing, pop music, cars, and furniture considered to be cool in one continent are admired in the other. In fact, a lot of Americans think of "European design" as automatically stylish. But mobile phone styling and features often polarize people in the US and Europe. In Europe, people generally hate external antennas on a phone. In the US, most people don't notice the antenna, and if they do notice it they may well like it because they assume it'll give better coverage.
Many people in Europe love candybar phones. Most Americans think they look cheap and dislike them. Instead, many Americans love flip phones. I think they feel the flip cover prevents accidental calls, and keeps the screen from getting scratched. Maybe they also feel a bit like Captain Kirk when they flip open the phone.
Many Europeans hate flip phones. I don't know why (although I'll speculate that the flip cover makes it inconvenient to send and receive a lot of SMS messages).
SMS vs. IM. Speaking of SMS, it's vastly more popular in Europe than it is in the US. Some of this difference is generational – young people in the US are much more likely to use SMS, whereas it's extremely rare among older Americans. Some of the difference is also training – most Americans don't have a clue how to enter text on a keypad. But even among young Americans, who do the most texting, I think PC-based instant messaging is still the king, now often tied to webcams.
History helps to explain the difference. The US started with a more PC-centric culture, and then IM was pushed aggressively by AOL in the United States, years before many mobile phones here were SMS-capable. There was no great champion for instant messaging in Europe, and besides PCs with Internet connections were less common there in the early days of IM. So SMS had a lot less competition.
Because of differences in mobile phone billing plans, I'm told that sending an SMS was often much cheaper than making a voice call in Europe. US mobile plans, with their large blocks of monthly minutes, supposedly create less of an incentive to use SMS. (In fact, many American mobile plans don't by default include any pre-paid text messages; you pay separately for each one. There's an amusing television commercial by one of the US mobile carriers showing a father relentlessly pursuing his teenage daughter around town – not to keep her out of trouble with her boyfriend, but to keep her from sending text messages on her phone.)
I did a quick spot check of Orange (UK) and Cingular (US) mobile plan charges, to look at the current price differential between voice and text. The main difference was actually that everything in the UK cost more than it does in the US, perhaps due to the horrific dollar-pound exchange rate. The difference between the US and UK in treatment of text messages was not as dramatic as I expected, but it was there. Today the US and UK both charge more for voice than text, but the plans I looked at in the UK almost all either bundled text messages in the base plan, or had options to get a lot of text messages for free if you spent a certain amount on your voice calls. In the US, text messages were always an option that you had to purchase separately, and there was no opportunity to get free text messages. Basically, you have to plan on spending extra if you want to do texting in the US.
(The details: Using a prepaid plan, Cingular in the US will sell you 900 minutes a month for $60, but you'll have to pay $5 extra per month to get 200 text messages. That same $60 spent with Orange in the UK will get you just 325 voice minutes, but 150 text messages are included in the base price. The UK plan creates a strong incentive to substitute text for a voice call when you can.
(If you look at pay as you go plans, Orange charges 38-76 cents a minute for voice calls [depending on whether the call is to a mobile or a land line], and 19 cents for each text message. So a text message is half to a quarter the price of a voice call. However, Orange also gives you 1,000 free text messages if you spend more than $19 a month. Most people would end up getting the free texting, so their effective price for text messaging drops to almost zero. Cingular charges you about 25 cents a minute for voice calls, and five cents per text message. Texting is one fifth the price of a voice call, actually a better ratio than Orange. However, there's no option to get free text messages, so you know you're paying for them no matter what.)
Differences in market structure
Operator power. In general, the US carriers have more power over their customers than the European operators do, for several reasons. The first is that pay as you go plans are much more popular in Europe than they are in the US. In some countries (Italy, for example), almost everyone was on pay as you go the last time I checked. In other places in Europe, users are split between pay as you go and contracts. But I don't know of any place in Europe where as many people are on contracts as they are in the US (please speak up if I've got that wrong – it's hard to find numbers on the percent of users on each type of payment program).
The second difference is mobile phone number portability (which lets you keep your number if you switch mobile operators). Many countries in Europe had it years before it came into the United States. For example, the UK got portability in 1998, Spain and Sweden in 2000, and Italy in 2001. Americans didn't get it until the end of 2003.
Another important difference is that in parts of Europe phone subsidies are illegal. I know about this one because at Palm I used to track the sales prices of mobile phones, and they varied wildly from country to country. I finally figured out that the subsidies were skewing the numbers. The subsidy laws are changing, and they may be allowed in most countries by now.
I think the relatively weaker customer control of European operators has driven faster innovation in Europe, because the operators have to do more to attract customers. They also can't lock a phone vendor out of the market completely, the way the US carriers have been strangling SonyEricsson.
Mobile versus fixed. Fixed-line phone companies in Europe are often monopolies, legendary for high costs and poor service. I have been told by many friends in Europe that it was faster and cheaper to get a mobile phone there than to wait for a land line, which drove very rapid movement toward mobiles. In the US, land line phone service is generally reliable, quick to install, and cheap, so there's much less incentive to get away from it. Some younger people in the US are starting to get rid of their land lines, but the movement is much slower than in Europe.
Reliability of coverage. In much of Europe, mobile phone coverage is more or less ubiquitous. There are always exceptions, of course, but generally you can make a voice call anytime you want to.
This really came home to me recently when I had the good fortune of taking a driving vacation in the fjords of western Norway. That's some of the most mountainous landscape in Europe, but I never noticed a spot where I was out of coverage (check out this coverage map). Contrast that to a driving vacation in the western US, where once you get out of the cities it is almost impossible to get a signal anywhere. For example, when I was in Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona a couple of years ago, I couldn't get a mobile phone signal anywhere in the park.
The usual American excuse for its poor coverage is that US population densities are low. That doesn't hold up to close examination – Norway has about 15 people per square kilometer, the same density as Arizona, which is not exactly crowded. The US overall has about 33, more than double Norway's density. I think Europe is just more dedicated to universal mobile coverage.
Brands. The prominence of mobile phone brands varies tremendously from continent to continent, and even from country to country in Europe. In general, Nokia is much better known and respected in Europe. Motorola is much better known and respected in the US (although it doesn't have the rock star status that Nokia has in Europe). And there are national champions like Siemens, which is heavily respected in Germany but nowhere else I know of. Samsung's brand awareness has been steadily rising in both the US and Europe, and LG is trying to tail along after it.
The differences over Nokia are the most surprising to my friends in Europe. Throughout Europe, and actually most of the world, Nokia is one of the top elite brands, like Nike in sports or Microsoft in computers. It produces an immediate aura of respectability. In the US, Nokia is lost in the crowd of semi-anonymous Euro-brands -- names like Saab or Peugeot that you've heard of but have never experienced personally.
I think Nokia recently compounded this problem with its "It's your life in there" television commercials in the US. The commercial that stuck in my mind was about "Jill," who praises the phone's ability to delete an ex-boyfriend from her phone's address book:
"It is so great because when you go to the phone and you delete and your phone asks 'Are you sure?' You look at your phone and you're like, 'oh yeah, I'm sure.'"
She then gives one of the most annoying, braying laughs I've heard on TV since...well. Ernestine.
I understand what Nokia was trying to do – it was making a sophisticated effort to tap into the mobile phone culture in the US. You can read a detailed ethnographic analysis of the ad campaign here. The problem for me was that, first, the mobile phone culture Nokia's trying to tap into is pretty weak in the US; and second, that Jill has just a whiff of trailer trash about her.
(Nokia has pulled the website for the campaign, which perhaps tells you how well it was received, but you can still find the commercial on the site of the agency that created it. Just follow this link and move your mouse around on the slider at the bottom of the page until you find Jill. You can also check out the other losers Nokia featured in the series.)
Americans tend to respond best to aspirational ads that make them feel good about themselves for buying a product. So buying a Mac will give you kinship with Einstein and Gandhi, which is outrageous but Steve Jobs can pull that off. Nokia's unintended message was that a Nokia phone will turn you into "a sniveling Sex in the City wannabe," as Gizmodo put it.
I think this is typical of Nokia's inability to connect with the American public.
What about the rest of the world?
There are even bigger variations in the mobile market in other parts of the world, but I didn't have the time (or the knowledge) to discuss all of them here. Mobile phone services and features in Japan and Korea make both Americans and Europeans look like techno-hicks. In Japan, the operators have so much power that phones are sold virtually unbranded, and Japanese phone manufacturers struggle to operate anywhere else in the world because the required reflexes are so different. It will be interesting to see what happens in Japan when number portability is implemented there, in late October. Surveys have said that large numbers of Japanese mobile phone users, especially those on Vodafone, would switch operators if the could.
The market worldwide is so complex that I think it's impossible for any one person to understand it all. So please help me out -- if I missed your country, or if you'd like to add to or correct something I said above, please post a comment.
In the US, a cellphone is a tool. In Europe, a mobile phone is a lifestyle.
I guess I ought to give a few details. Let me start with a disclaimer: It's very dangerous to talk about "Europeans" as if they're some sort of unified cultural group. Europe is a continent of many nationalities, and each one has a different culture and history. National regulations on phones also differ dramatically within Europe, which has an important impact on mobile use.
I saw a good example of this in the responses to my last post. I said all Europeans put their mobile phones on the table during a meal. I got replies from some countries agreeing with me, and others saying I was completely wrong. It turns out the table thing differs from country to country.
It's only slightly less hazardous to talk about a "typical" American mobile phone user. The culture in the US is more uniform than it is in Europe, but there are profound differences between various market segments. The average 16-year-old in the US views a mobile phone very differently than the average 40-year-old. (Come to think of it, I suspect average 40-year-old mobile users in Berlin and Chicago probably have more in common with each other than either of them have with the 16-year-old.)
Now that I've hedged thoroughly, here are those details:
Vocabulary
The differences start with the words we use to talk about the industry. In Europe, a mobile phone is usually called (in English-speaking countries) a "mobile." As in, "I'll ring your mobile." In the US, mobile phones are most often called "cellphones," and that's sometimes shortened: "I'll call your cell."
The term differs in other European countries, of course (for example, Hermann on Brighthand says the term in Germany is "handy.") I do know that if you say "cellphone" pretty much anywhere in Europe, people will look at you like you're a dork. Found that out the hard way.
Occasionally young people in the US use the term "mobile," but it's not very widespread. I try to use the term "mobile phone" in this website because it's understood on both continents.
There are also differences in the terms used to describe the companies that sell mobile phone services. In the US they are generally called "carriers." But the second easiest way to piss off a European mobile exec is to call his or her company a carrier. They are "operators." As the distinction was explained to me, an operator actively runs a network, while a carrier merely delivers something passively.
(In case you're wondering, the first easiest way to piss off a European mobile exec is to ask how his MMS revenues are doing.)
The operator vs. carrier thing is very confusing in the US, because to most Americans an "operator" is a person who runs a switchboard. The archetypal operator is Ernestine, a character created by actress Lily Tomlin. She snorted annoyingly, was rude, and reveled in her ability to manipulate customers:
"Here at the Phone Company we handle eighty-four billion calls a year. Serving everyone from presidents and kings to scum of the earth. (snort) We realize that every so often you can't get an operator, for no apparent reason your phone goes out of order [snatches plug out of switchboard], or perhaps you get charged for a call you didn't make. We don't care. Watch this [bangs on a switch panel like a cheap piano] just lost Peoria. (snort) You see, this phone system consists of a multibillion-dollar matrix of space-age technology that is so sophisticated, even we can't handle it. But that's your problem, isn't it? Next time you complain about your phone service, why don't you try using two Dixie cups with a string. We don't care. We don't have to. (snort) We're the Phone Company!"
–Ernestine
Some people might say that's a good metaphor for a mobile phone company, but it's hard for an American to understand why any company would want to apply the term to itself.
The mobile phone culture
To me, one of the most pronounced differences between mobile use in the US and Europe is that Europe has a more developed mobile phone culture. There are huge variations in attitude from person to person, but on average, people in Europe expect the mobile to play a more prominent, recognized role in the structure of society, and many people look to the mobile as a central source of new innovations. The belief is almost that the mobile phone has a manifest destiny to subsume everything else. This love affair with the mobile phone is far more common in Europe than it is in America.
You can find a good example of this attitude in an essay about the future, on the website of the Club of Amsterdam, a think tank based in the Netherlands:
"Every machine will be a mobile phone, talking to their owner but mainly to other machines.... In 2020 the world is one big video screen, one big video camera, one big mobile phone.... The mobile will act as a "trust machine". It will be our most important lifestyle instrument. It will probably be decomposed with its core elements scattered all over and inside our body."
People in the US can be just as enthusiastic about mobilizing technology, but they often think in terms of shrinking and mobilizing the PC and Internet, rather than growing the cellphone. In the US, the cellphone is often viewed as a necessary tool rather than something to love. For example, an MIT survey in 2004 found that Americans rated the cellphone number one in the list of inventions they hate but can't live without, edging out the dreaded alarm clock.
If you're still having trouble picturing the difference in attitudes, look at it this way – many people in Europe feel about their mobiles the way that Californians feel about their cars.
Okay? Got it now?
The European love of the mobile phone has several facets to it...
Fashion. To many people in Europe, their mobile phone seems to be a fashion statement. It says something about you, much like your clothing. Americans also care about the look of their phones (just take a look at my daughter's Razr, covered in stick-on jewels and shiny dangling beady things). But in general I don't think Americans identify with the phone as deeply.
It seems much more common for someone in Europe to change phones than it is for someone in the US. All phones in Europe are GSM, and people generally understand that you can pop out your SIM card and pop it into a new phone anytime you want. The mobile is just a skin that you wrap around your phone contract. Major retail chains, like Carphone Warehouse, sell large numbers of mobile phones independent of any operator.
Although you can do the same sort of phone swap in the US if you have a GSM phone, it seems like relatively few people do it, and very few phones are sold outside of the carriers' stores. I'm not sure why. I think awareness of the capability is lower (I'll bet a majority of American GSM users couldn't even find their SIM card). And of course many mobile phone users in the US are on CDMA, forcing them to go through the carrier if they want to switch phones. But also, I think there's just less desire to constantly update your phone in the US, because people don't pay as much attention to it.
Design. This is related to the fashion topic, but it deserves a separate discussion because it's so surprising, at least to me. In most consumer goods, there's an approximate consensus on design between the US and Europe. You can find exceptions, but in general clothing, pop music, cars, and furniture considered to be cool in one continent are admired in the other. In fact, a lot of Americans think of "European design" as automatically stylish. But mobile phone styling and features often polarize people in the US and Europe. In Europe, people generally hate external antennas on a phone. In the US, most people don't notice the antenna, and if they do notice it they may well like it because they assume it'll give better coverage.
Many people in Europe love candybar phones. Most Americans think they look cheap and dislike them. Instead, many Americans love flip phones. I think they feel the flip cover prevents accidental calls, and keeps the screen from getting scratched. Maybe they also feel a bit like Captain Kirk when they flip open the phone.
Many Europeans hate flip phones. I don't know why (although I'll speculate that the flip cover makes it inconvenient to send and receive a lot of SMS messages).
SMS vs. IM. Speaking of SMS, it's vastly more popular in Europe than it is in the US. Some of this difference is generational – young people in the US are much more likely to use SMS, whereas it's extremely rare among older Americans. Some of the difference is also training – most Americans don't have a clue how to enter text on a keypad. But even among young Americans, who do the most texting, I think PC-based instant messaging is still the king, now often tied to webcams.
History helps to explain the difference. The US started with a more PC-centric culture, and then IM was pushed aggressively by AOL in the United States, years before many mobile phones here were SMS-capable. There was no great champion for instant messaging in Europe, and besides PCs with Internet connections were less common there in the early days of IM. So SMS had a lot less competition.
Because of differences in mobile phone billing plans, I'm told that sending an SMS was often much cheaper than making a voice call in Europe. US mobile plans, with their large blocks of monthly minutes, supposedly create less of an incentive to use SMS. (In fact, many American mobile plans don't by default include any pre-paid text messages; you pay separately for each one. There's an amusing television commercial by one of the US mobile carriers showing a father relentlessly pursuing his teenage daughter around town – not to keep her out of trouble with her boyfriend, but to keep her from sending text messages on her phone.)
I did a quick spot check of Orange (UK) and Cingular (US) mobile plan charges, to look at the current price differential between voice and text. The main difference was actually that everything in the UK cost more than it does in the US, perhaps due to the horrific dollar-pound exchange rate. The difference between the US and UK in treatment of text messages was not as dramatic as I expected, but it was there. Today the US and UK both charge more for voice than text, but the plans I looked at in the UK almost all either bundled text messages in the base plan, or had options to get a lot of text messages for free if you spent a certain amount on your voice calls. In the US, text messages were always an option that you had to purchase separately, and there was no opportunity to get free text messages. Basically, you have to plan on spending extra if you want to do texting in the US.
(The details: Using a prepaid plan, Cingular in the US will sell you 900 minutes a month for $60, but you'll have to pay $5 extra per month to get 200 text messages. That same $60 spent with Orange in the UK will get you just 325 voice minutes, but 150 text messages are included in the base price. The UK plan creates a strong incentive to substitute text for a voice call when you can.
(If you look at pay as you go plans, Orange charges 38-76 cents a minute for voice calls [depending on whether the call is to a mobile or a land line], and 19 cents for each text message. So a text message is half to a quarter the price of a voice call. However, Orange also gives you 1,000 free text messages if you spend more than $19 a month. Most people would end up getting the free texting, so their effective price for text messaging drops to almost zero. Cingular charges you about 25 cents a minute for voice calls, and five cents per text message. Texting is one fifth the price of a voice call, actually a better ratio than Orange. However, there's no option to get free text messages, so you know you're paying for them no matter what.)
Differences in market structure
Operator power. In general, the US carriers have more power over their customers than the European operators do, for several reasons. The first is that pay as you go plans are much more popular in Europe than they are in the US. In some countries (Italy, for example), almost everyone was on pay as you go the last time I checked. In other places in Europe, users are split between pay as you go and contracts. But I don't know of any place in Europe where as many people are on contracts as they are in the US (please speak up if I've got that wrong – it's hard to find numbers on the percent of users on each type of payment program).
The second difference is mobile phone number portability (which lets you keep your number if you switch mobile operators). Many countries in Europe had it years before it came into the United States. For example, the UK got portability in 1998, Spain and Sweden in 2000, and Italy in 2001. Americans didn't get it until the end of 2003.
Another important difference is that in parts of Europe phone subsidies are illegal. I know about this one because at Palm I used to track the sales prices of mobile phones, and they varied wildly from country to country. I finally figured out that the subsidies were skewing the numbers. The subsidy laws are changing, and they may be allowed in most countries by now.
I think the relatively weaker customer control of European operators has driven faster innovation in Europe, because the operators have to do more to attract customers. They also can't lock a phone vendor out of the market completely, the way the US carriers have been strangling SonyEricsson.
Mobile versus fixed. Fixed-line phone companies in Europe are often monopolies, legendary for high costs and poor service. I have been told by many friends in Europe that it was faster and cheaper to get a mobile phone there than to wait for a land line, which drove very rapid movement toward mobiles. In the US, land line phone service is generally reliable, quick to install, and cheap, so there's much less incentive to get away from it. Some younger people in the US are starting to get rid of their land lines, but the movement is much slower than in Europe.
Reliability of coverage. In much of Europe, mobile phone coverage is more or less ubiquitous. There are always exceptions, of course, but generally you can make a voice call anytime you want to.
This really came home to me recently when I had the good fortune of taking a driving vacation in the fjords of western Norway. That's some of the most mountainous landscape in Europe, but I never noticed a spot where I was out of coverage (check out this coverage map). Contrast that to a driving vacation in the western US, where once you get out of the cities it is almost impossible to get a signal anywhere. For example, when I was in Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona a couple of years ago, I couldn't get a mobile phone signal anywhere in the park.
The usual American excuse for its poor coverage is that US population densities are low. That doesn't hold up to close examination – Norway has about 15 people per square kilometer, the same density as Arizona, which is not exactly crowded. The US overall has about 33, more than double Norway's density. I think Europe is just more dedicated to universal mobile coverage.
Brands. The prominence of mobile phone brands varies tremendously from continent to continent, and even from country to country in Europe. In general, Nokia is much better known and respected in Europe. Motorola is much better known and respected in the US (although it doesn't have the rock star status that Nokia has in Europe). And there are national champions like Siemens, which is heavily respected in Germany but nowhere else I know of. Samsung's brand awareness has been steadily rising in both the US and Europe, and LG is trying to tail along after it.
The differences over Nokia are the most surprising to my friends in Europe. Throughout Europe, and actually most of the world, Nokia is one of the top elite brands, like Nike in sports or Microsoft in computers. It produces an immediate aura of respectability. In the US, Nokia is lost in the crowd of semi-anonymous Euro-brands -- names like Saab or Peugeot that you've heard of but have never experienced personally.
I think Nokia recently compounded this problem with its "It's your life in there" television commercials in the US. The commercial that stuck in my mind was about "Jill," who praises the phone's ability to delete an ex-boyfriend from her phone's address book:
"It is so great because when you go to the phone and you delete and your phone asks 'Are you sure?' You look at your phone and you're like, 'oh yeah, I'm sure.'"
She then gives one of the most annoying, braying laughs I've heard on TV since...well. Ernestine.
I understand what Nokia was trying to do – it was making a sophisticated effort to tap into the mobile phone culture in the US. You can read a detailed ethnographic analysis of the ad campaign here. The problem for me was that, first, the mobile phone culture Nokia's trying to tap into is pretty weak in the US; and second, that Jill has just a whiff of trailer trash about her.
(Nokia has pulled the website for the campaign, which perhaps tells you how well it was received, but you can still find the commercial on the site of the agency that created it. Just follow this link and move your mouse around on the slider at the bottom of the page until you find Jill. You can also check out the other losers Nokia featured in the series.)
Americans tend to respond best to aspirational ads that make them feel good about themselves for buying a product. So buying a Mac will give you kinship with Einstein and Gandhi, which is outrageous but Steve Jobs can pull that off. Nokia's unintended message was that a Nokia phone will turn you into "a sniveling Sex in the City wannabe," as Gizmodo put it.
I think this is typical of Nokia's inability to connect with the American public.
What about the rest of the world?
There are even bigger variations in the mobile market in other parts of the world, but I didn't have the time (or the knowledge) to discuss all of them here. Mobile phone services and features in Japan and Korea make both Americans and Europeans look like techno-hicks. In Japan, the operators have so much power that phones are sold virtually unbranded, and Japanese phone manufacturers struggle to operate anywhere else in the world because the required reflexes are so different. It will be interesting to see what happens in Japan when number portability is implemented there, in late October. Surveys have said that large numbers of Japanese mobile phone users, especially those on Vodafone, would switch operators if the could.
The market worldwide is so complex that I think it's impossible for any one person to understand it all. So please help me out -- if I missed your country, or if you'd like to add to or correct something I said above, please post a comment.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Crunch Protector
OK, let's have a show of hands, who likes soggy cereal? Just as we thought, a couple of troublemakers out there but most of you don't enjoy limp flakes. It's a view you share with the inventor of the Crunch Protector. The concept is simple,; separate your dry cereal from your wet milk until right before you eat it for true "just in time" delivery.
To use; fill the base of the milk bowl with sand (#21) to counter the weight of the cereal in the upper bowl (#23). Now urge an appropriate amount of cereal down the chute (#14) to the awaiting milk in the lower bowl (#22) and eat. Continue to urge and eat while keeping your Rice Krispy and your Cap'ns Crunch.Thursday, July 10, 2008
Skateboard Pirate
Monday, July 7, 2008
Will the smartphone kill the PC?
Here's what they said:
"The personal computer as we know it will soon be dead, replaced by rapidly growing demand for smart mobile devices, according to the head of Symbian." --IT Pro
"Mobile phone access will be the next significant Internet phenomenon." --Symbian press release
"In five years' time you'll wonder why you need a PC at all." --John Forsyth, Symbian's Head of Market Propositions (a title that apparently means something very different in the UK than it would in the US)
They sound disturbingly like some of the most enthusiastic PDA enthusiasts did in 2000. I cringed then, and I cringe now. Here's why:
A PC, at its heart, is about information creation. The keyboard, mouse or trackpad, large screen, and large memory are all there because they're needed to manipulate words and images and numbers – spreadsheets, written documents, presentations, graphics, and databases. Despite all the hoopla about browsing and games and e-mail, creating and editing information is still the core use of the PC. That's why efforts to produce smaller or cheaper PCs with fewer features have all been failures -- take out the core productivity tools, and people won't buy the product.
Mobile devices are built around a different type of usage. They're all about information and communication access while you're on the go. They deliberately compromise information creation in order to get more mobility. So they're wonderful for voice communication, nice for simple texting, and adequate for short e-mail. But every effort to use them for heavy-duty information creation has been a miserable failure.
For a smartphones to replace PCs, they would have to take on all the features of a PC -- they'd need to input and edit text as easily as a PC, create spreadsheets as easily as a PC, edit pictures and presentations as easily as a PC, and manage large databases as easily as a PC. To do that in a small mobile device, you need a color folding screen (so you can work with large documents), either a full-size keyboard or perfect voice recognition, a pointing device a heck of a lot more sophisticated than a five-way rocker, enormous amounts of storage, and a fast processor.
Oh, and you need an operating system that doesn't break its installed base of apps every time it moves to a new version.
The color folding screen is in development, sort of, but many years away. Voice recognition is getting better on PCs, but it requires a ton of processing power and memory. I like the RIM Pearl trackball, so that might work out OK for the pointing device. But the processor requirement is a killer – a fast processor means lots of power, and battery capacity is simply not up to it today. Maybe it'll happen when we get fuel cells small enough for mobiles, sometime around the end of the decade.
I think when you add up all the uncertainties, it'll be another six years at least before you see a fully functional PC replacement as small as a mobile phone (in other words, it's beyond any realistic product planning horizon today). By that time, something the size of a PC will be even more powerful, and people may well trade up to that. But even if they don't, a mobile device with all that power and feature set could easily run Microsoft Windows itself, so why does Symbian think it's going to take over? More likely Microsoft will displace Symbian, since all the most popular productivity apps already run on Windows.
No, the realistic scenario is that PCs and smartphones (and other mobile devices to come) will prosper in parallel for years, each doing its own thing increasingly well. There will be some overlap at the edges, but the core usage of each product will remain very distinct. Meanwhile, the web apps platform will continue to gradually eat away at both operating systems, transforming them into commoditized plumbing that few people care about.
I'm not sure which OS will withstand web apps commoditization longer. Windows is more vulnerable to displacement by web apps because so many PCs have reliable high-speed web access. Symbian is somewhat protected because high-speed wireless is costly and eats even more battery power, and besides the operators are interfering with the deployment of web apps in the mobile space. On the other hand, Symbian has a lot fewer loyal applications developers than Windows, and in fact the lack of Symbian apps at the recent Symbian conference was noted by some observers. A smaller applications base means less resistance to commoditization, because there are fewer apps to replace.
Overall, if I were at either Symbian or Microsoft right now, I wouldn't be bragging too much about the inevitable forces of history. Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, Symbian...
"The personal computer as we know it will soon be dead, replaced by rapidly growing demand for smart mobile devices, according to the head of Symbian." --IT Pro
"Mobile phone access will be the next significant Internet phenomenon." --Symbian press release
"In five years' time you'll wonder why you need a PC at all." --John Forsyth, Symbian's Head of Market Propositions (a title that apparently means something very different in the UK than it would in the US)
They sound disturbingly like some of the most enthusiastic PDA enthusiasts did in 2000. I cringed then, and I cringe now. Here's why:
A PC, at its heart, is about information creation. The keyboard, mouse or trackpad, large screen, and large memory are all there because they're needed to manipulate words and images and numbers – spreadsheets, written documents, presentations, graphics, and databases. Despite all the hoopla about browsing and games and e-mail, creating and editing information is still the core use of the PC. That's why efforts to produce smaller or cheaper PCs with fewer features have all been failures -- take out the core productivity tools, and people won't buy the product.
Mobile devices are built around a different type of usage. They're all about information and communication access while you're on the go. They deliberately compromise information creation in order to get more mobility. So they're wonderful for voice communication, nice for simple texting, and adequate for short e-mail. But every effort to use them for heavy-duty information creation has been a miserable failure.
For a smartphones to replace PCs, they would have to take on all the features of a PC -- they'd need to input and edit text as easily as a PC, create spreadsheets as easily as a PC, edit pictures and presentations as easily as a PC, and manage large databases as easily as a PC. To do that in a small mobile device, you need a color folding screen (so you can work with large documents), either a full-size keyboard or perfect voice recognition, a pointing device a heck of a lot more sophisticated than a five-way rocker, enormous amounts of storage, and a fast processor.
Oh, and you need an operating system that doesn't break its installed base of apps every time it moves to a new version.
The color folding screen is in development, sort of, but many years away. Voice recognition is getting better on PCs, but it requires a ton of processing power and memory. I like the RIM Pearl trackball, so that might work out OK for the pointing device. But the processor requirement is a killer – a fast processor means lots of power, and battery capacity is simply not up to it today. Maybe it'll happen when we get fuel cells small enough for mobiles, sometime around the end of the decade.
I think when you add up all the uncertainties, it'll be another six years at least before you see a fully functional PC replacement as small as a mobile phone (in other words, it's beyond any realistic product planning horizon today). By that time, something the size of a PC will be even more powerful, and people may well trade up to that. But even if they don't, a mobile device with all that power and feature set could easily run Microsoft Windows itself, so why does Symbian think it's going to take over? More likely Microsoft will displace Symbian, since all the most popular productivity apps already run on Windows.
No, the realistic scenario is that PCs and smartphones (and other mobile devices to come) will prosper in parallel for years, each doing its own thing increasingly well. There will be some overlap at the edges, but the core usage of each product will remain very distinct. Meanwhile, the web apps platform will continue to gradually eat away at both operating systems, transforming them into commoditized plumbing that few people care about.
I'm not sure which OS will withstand web apps commoditization longer. Windows is more vulnerable to displacement by web apps because so many PCs have reliable high-speed web access. Symbian is somewhat protected because high-speed wireless is costly and eats even more battery power, and besides the operators are interfering with the deployment of web apps in the mobile space. On the other hand, Symbian has a lot fewer loyal applications developers than Windows, and in fact the lack of Symbian apps at the recent Symbian conference was noted by some observers. A smaller applications base means less resistance to commoditization, because there are fewer apps to replace.
Overall, if I were at either Symbian or Microsoft right now, I wouldn't be bragging too much about the inevitable forces of history. Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, Symbian...
The shape of the smartphone and mobile data markets
With all the new mobile devices coming out, I thought it would be useful to give an overview of the market for mobile data. I covered some of this information in a post written about a year ago, but this one has a lot of new information, plus diagrams.
I believe the market for mobile data devices (smartphones, PDAs, mobile game machines, iPods, etc) is not structured the way most people think it is. A lot of new mobile products fail because they're not designed for the real market, or because they target imagined customers who don't really exist in large numbers.
There are two big erroneous assumptions that I think many people make about mobile data:
First incorrect assumption: Mobile data is for everyone. Most people assume that mobile data devices like smartphones will eventually be used by everyone. The idea is that they're being bought by early adopters now, but as prices drop they'll soon be adopted by the whole population. The market is supposed to look like this:
Higher prices are to the right. Smartphone sales start with the early adopters at the right, and then as prices drop everyone switches to smartphones and starts using all their features.
The only problem with this idea is that there's no evidence to indicate that it's true, at least not in the US and Europe (where I've done research). In fact, almost all of the evidence I've seen to date shows that the market is deeply divided into two groups. When surveyed, most people in the US and Europe say they will not pay anything extra for mobile device features other than voice and SMS. They'll use those features if you give them away for free, but as soon as you ask them to pay, about 65% of the population drops out. This makes them very unpromising targets for device companies that want to sell value-added devices, operators who want to sell advanced services, and software companies that want to sell mobile data apps.
Fortunately, the other 35% of the US and European population is willing to pay extra for mobile data features.
So the real market looks like this:
The people I labeled "value-added users" are the mobile data market. But that's only the beginning...
Second incorrect assumption: There is one smartphone market. Most people assume that there's just one market for smartphones, and that eventually we'll see the emergence of a single ultimate smartphone that everyone uses. I can't tell you how many times I got that question from press people and analysts when I worked at Palm: "Which is the device that everyone's going to use?"
The answer is, that device doesn't exist, because the people who are willing to pay extra for mobile data features don't all want the same features. They want conflicting things, and are very unwilling to pay extra for the features they don't want. The ideal hobile device for me might be completely repulsive to you, and vice-versa.
This misconception has fueled an uncounted number of online debates in which people argue why the device they like ought to be adopted by everyone. What they're really arguing is that everyone else should think and feel like them, which is why these online debates never reach a conclusion.
Rather than looking for the mobile market to "converge" the way that most PCs converged to Windows, I think we should expect mobile devices to diverge into different segments. The right analogy for the mobile market isn't PCs, it's cars. As the car market grew in the 1900s, it stratified into trucks and minivans and SUVs and sports cars and so on.
The same divergence is already underway in mobile data.
There are at least three segments in mobile data
If mobile data isn't for everyone on the planet, and if the market is divided into segments, the most important question to ask is what those segments are. What are the equivalent of the sports car, SUV, and minivan for mobile?
We researched that extensively at PalmSource, in a series of surveys that eventually talked to more than 12,000 people in the US, France, Germany, and the UK. In that research, we found at least three big groups of mobile data customers, each with different needs and tastes: people who focus on communication (e-mail, messaging, conferencing), people who focus on entertainment (games, video, music), and people who focus on managing information (databases, documents, note-taking). Each was about 12% of the population.
The results were very consistent across countries, so I'm comfortable that the same segments probably exist in most European countries. The only significant difference was Germany, where the percent of the population who said they were willing to pay for entertainment features was smaller. I don't know if that's a real difference in usage, or if folks in Germany are just less willing to admit that they might use a computing device to play games.
The results probably can't be projected to other places like Japan and China; somebody else needs to do that research (or I'll do it if you want to fund it ;-) .
Here's a little detail on each of the three mobile data segments:
The entertainment-focused users are generally younger than average; many are in college or their 20s. They see a mobile device as a lifestyle choice, and they're willing to pay extra for a device that'll help keep them entertained. Different people want different forms of entertainment, so there are sub-segments in the entertainment mobile market. The biggest division is game-playing vs. media (music and video). But entertainment can also include things like social messaging with your friends. It's anything you do for fun rather than a paycheck.
The communication-focused users are extroverts who live to communicate with others. They're often in people-facing jobs like sales. They're willing to pay extra for a mobile device that lets them keep up with others in multiple ways. E-mail, SMS, voice, conferencing, video calling -- basically, anything communication-related is compelling to them, and they will pay extra for a device that does it well.
The information-centric users are more introverted. Rather than focusing on their dialog with others, they tend to do a lot of thinking on their own, and want their mobile device to be a memory supplement and a means to capture new information. They're not by any means recluses, but ideas rather than social interaction are what really gets them energized, and so they're willing to pay extra for features that help them capture and remember ideas and information. What they really want is a brain extender. They often work in information-heavy jobs like medicine, law, science, and academia.
Of course, there's always some overlap between markets -- for instance, you might have a doctor who also wants to stay entertained when off work. So if you draw the three mobile data markets, they overlap a bit, like one of those Venn diagrams you drew in primary school:
Understanding the products
Now that we've mapped the customer landscape, we can start plotting various products on the chart. This is where we'll start to get some interesting insights. But first, we have to add one technology overlay: in the mobile world, some mobile devices have phones built in and some don't. So add a gray circle in the center:
Now let's chart some products.
The communicators:
This is the most crowded market (in fact, I left off a number of products because I ran out of space on the chart). Although there used to be communicators without phones built in (RIM's early products were an example), putting all communication in one place is a huge benefit to a communication-centric user, so merging the phone and communicator was an obvious move in this market.
I classify the Danger Hiptop as a borderline product between the entertainment and communication markets because it's focused on social communication for young people. Sony Mylo is another borderline product, this one without a phone.
The Palm Treo, SonyEricsson p900 line, and touchscreen Windows Mobile products are on the border between communication and information management. They all have touch screens and a lot of information management features, but also attempt to deliver robust e-mail. At this point, they are being outsold by the much more communication-specialized RIM Blackberry line.
In the entertainer market, you can see the strong role of sub-segments. The game-player market has been dominated by Nintendo's GameBoy, with the recent addition of Sony's PSP. The media market is ruled by the Apple iPod.
The iPhone is an attempt to create a phone + media entertainment device. It'll be interesting to see how the iPhone does in the market -- it was an obvious move to combine a communicator with a phone, but it's not as obvious that the entertainer is a natural match with a phone. The danger to Apple will be if users see iPhone as the worst of both worlds: a phone that lacks a good keypad and an iPod with very small memory.
Information managers are an underserved market. Early PDAs targeted these users, but the device features were too limited to build a lasting franchise. The main champions of the PDA market, Palm and Microsoft, have now both focused most of their effort toward communicators. As a result, information manager innovation has basically ground to a halt, and the users in this space are very frustrated.
What it means: Opportunities and dangers
Some types of convergence are better than others. Combining phone technology with a mobile data device can be very successful when you stay within a single usage market. You tailor both the phone features and the data features to the needs of that particular type of customer. But trying to converge two markets is an extremely risky idea, something mobile companies should avoid. The needs of the markets conflict, so there is an extremely high risk that you'll end up being cannibalized on either side by products designed specifically for the needs of single markets.
The communicator market is over-crowded and therefore risky. When you realize that the communicator market is only about 12% of the population, there are probably more communicator products shipping now than the market can support. Communicators are likely to face price pressure, and some of the products will probably sink like a stone. The RIM and Palm OS products are probably a little safer here because they have more unique features and loyal customer bases, and Nokia may do okay if it can add some differentiation. But Windows Mobile communicators are likely to be a happy market only for mobile companies that can live on commodity margins.
This is not a place where I'd be looking to build new devices, but many companies are introducing new communicators because they'd rather pursue an established market than build a new one.
The iPhone is not a Blackberry killer. One of the things I like about this chart is that it shows immediately why the iPhone is not a major threat to Blackberry sales. They're in very different markets. If RIM is hoping to move into the entertainment market with devices like the Pearl, iPhone definitely interferes with that. But the immediate impact of the iPhone is on the products closest to it, meaning Microsoft Zune and the SonyEricsson music phones.
If you don't fit in one of the segments, it's very hard to sell. One of the messages of the market segmentation is that people will pay extra for great solutions to the needs they have in a particular segment. If your product doesn't solve any of those problems, there's not a market for it. Many failures in the mobile data market have been products that focused on features rather than solving specific problems. They may be beloved by technophiles, but there aren't enough of those people to drive a lot of sales. See Nokia's 770 Internet tablet for a good example.
The biggest opportunity is in information management. This market is about the same size as the communicator market, but no major player is investing in it today. This segment is out of favor because of the decline in PDA sales, but remember that people thought the MP3 market was a backwater until Apple introduced the iPod. I can tell you from personal conversations, and the market research, that there's a substantial market here, and the people in it are very frustrated. I think the ideal product for this market would be a minitablet note-taker, which I refer to as an "info pad." You can read more about it here.
What about the middle of the chart?
The other segment we haven't discussed is the center of the chart, the place where information management, communication, and entertainment all come together. Some people like to think of this as the home of the ultimate converged device, and every now and then you'll see a hardware company try to tackle it.
They all fail.
In reality, the center of the chart is a market dead zone. To use the car analogy, designing a mobile data device for all three markets simultaneously is like trying to build a sports car that doubles as a minivan and a tractor. The result is not pretty, and won't be bought by anyone except gadget enthusiasts like me. Unfortunately, there aren't enough of us to make a significant market.
That's my view of the mobile data market. I'm sure other people have different perspectives; please post a comment and share yours.
I believe the market for mobile data devices (smartphones, PDAs, mobile game machines, iPods, etc) is not structured the way most people think it is. A lot of new mobile products fail because they're not designed for the real market, or because they target imagined customers who don't really exist in large numbers.
There are two big erroneous assumptions that I think many people make about mobile data:
First incorrect assumption: Mobile data is for everyone. Most people assume that mobile data devices like smartphones will eventually be used by everyone. The idea is that they're being bought by early adopters now, but as prices drop they'll soon be adopted by the whole population. The market is supposed to look like this:
Higher prices are to the right. Smartphone sales start with the early adopters at the right, and then as prices drop everyone switches to smartphones and starts using all their features.
The only problem with this idea is that there's no evidence to indicate that it's true, at least not in the US and Europe (where I've done research). In fact, almost all of the evidence I've seen to date shows that the market is deeply divided into two groups. When surveyed, most people in the US and Europe say they will not pay anything extra for mobile device features other than voice and SMS. They'll use those features if you give them away for free, but as soon as you ask them to pay, about 65% of the population drops out. This makes them very unpromising targets for device companies that want to sell value-added devices, operators who want to sell advanced services, and software companies that want to sell mobile data apps.
Fortunately, the other 35% of the US and European population is willing to pay extra for mobile data features.
So the real market looks like this:
The people I labeled "value-added users" are the mobile data market. But that's only the beginning...
Second incorrect assumption: There is one smartphone market. Most people assume that there's just one market for smartphones, and that eventually we'll see the emergence of a single ultimate smartphone that everyone uses. I can't tell you how many times I got that question from press people and analysts when I worked at Palm: "Which is the device that everyone's going to use?"
The answer is, that device doesn't exist, because the people who are willing to pay extra for mobile data features don't all want the same features. They want conflicting things, and are very unwilling to pay extra for the features they don't want. The ideal hobile device for me might be completely repulsive to you, and vice-versa.
This misconception has fueled an uncounted number of online debates in which people argue why the device they like ought to be adopted by everyone. What they're really arguing is that everyone else should think and feel like them, which is why these online debates never reach a conclusion.
Rather than looking for the mobile market to "converge" the way that most PCs converged to Windows, I think we should expect mobile devices to diverge into different segments. The right analogy for the mobile market isn't PCs, it's cars. As the car market grew in the 1900s, it stratified into trucks and minivans and SUVs and sports cars and so on.
The same divergence is already underway in mobile data.
There are at least three segments in mobile data
If mobile data isn't for everyone on the planet, and if the market is divided into segments, the most important question to ask is what those segments are. What are the equivalent of the sports car, SUV, and minivan for mobile?
We researched that extensively at PalmSource, in a series of surveys that eventually talked to more than 12,000 people in the US, France, Germany, and the UK. In that research, we found at least three big groups of mobile data customers, each with different needs and tastes: people who focus on communication (e-mail, messaging, conferencing), people who focus on entertainment (games, video, music), and people who focus on managing information (databases, documents, note-taking). Each was about 12% of the population.
The results were very consistent across countries, so I'm comfortable that the same segments probably exist in most European countries. The only significant difference was Germany, where the percent of the population who said they were willing to pay for entertainment features was smaller. I don't know if that's a real difference in usage, or if folks in Germany are just less willing to admit that they might use a computing device to play games.
The results probably can't be projected to other places like Japan and China; somebody else needs to do that research (or I'll do it if you want to fund it ;-) .
Here's a little detail on each of the three mobile data segments:
The entertainment-focused users are generally younger than average; many are in college or their 20s. They see a mobile device as a lifestyle choice, and they're willing to pay extra for a device that'll help keep them entertained. Different people want different forms of entertainment, so there are sub-segments in the entertainment mobile market. The biggest division is game-playing vs. media (music and video). But entertainment can also include things like social messaging with your friends. It's anything you do for fun rather than a paycheck.
The communication-focused users are extroverts who live to communicate with others. They're often in people-facing jobs like sales. They're willing to pay extra for a mobile device that lets them keep up with others in multiple ways. E-mail, SMS, voice, conferencing, video calling -- basically, anything communication-related is compelling to them, and they will pay extra for a device that does it well.
The information-centric users are more introverted. Rather than focusing on their dialog with others, they tend to do a lot of thinking on their own, and want their mobile device to be a memory supplement and a means to capture new information. They're not by any means recluses, but ideas rather than social interaction are what really gets them energized, and so they're willing to pay extra for features that help them capture and remember ideas and information. What they really want is a brain extender. They often work in information-heavy jobs like medicine, law, science, and academia.
Of course, there's always some overlap between markets -- for instance, you might have a doctor who also wants to stay entertained when off work. So if you draw the three mobile data markets, they overlap a bit, like one of those Venn diagrams you drew in primary school:
Understanding the products
Now that we've mapped the customer landscape, we can start plotting various products on the chart. This is where we'll start to get some interesting insights. But first, we have to add one technology overlay: in the mobile world, some mobile devices have phones built in and some don't. So add a gray circle in the center:
Now let's chart some products.
The communicators:
This is the most crowded market (in fact, I left off a number of products because I ran out of space on the chart). Although there used to be communicators without phones built in (RIM's early products were an example), putting all communication in one place is a huge benefit to a communication-centric user, so merging the phone and communicator was an obvious move in this market.
I classify the Danger Hiptop as a borderline product between the entertainment and communication markets because it's focused on social communication for young people. Sony Mylo is another borderline product, this one without a phone.
The Palm Treo, SonyEricsson p900 line, and touchscreen Windows Mobile products are on the border between communication and information management. They all have touch screens and a lot of information management features, but also attempt to deliver robust e-mail. At this point, they are being outsold by the much more communication-specialized RIM Blackberry line.
In the entertainer market, you can see the strong role of sub-segments. The game-player market has been dominated by Nintendo's GameBoy, with the recent addition of Sony's PSP. The media market is ruled by the Apple iPod.
The iPhone is an attempt to create a phone + media entertainment device. It'll be interesting to see how the iPhone does in the market -- it was an obvious move to combine a communicator with a phone, but it's not as obvious that the entertainer is a natural match with a phone. The danger to Apple will be if users see iPhone as the worst of both worlds: a phone that lacks a good keypad and an iPod with very small memory.
Information managers are an underserved market. Early PDAs targeted these users, but the device features were too limited to build a lasting franchise. The main champions of the PDA market, Palm and Microsoft, have now both focused most of their effort toward communicators. As a result, information manager innovation has basically ground to a halt, and the users in this space are very frustrated.
What it means: Opportunities and dangers
Some types of convergence are better than others. Combining phone technology with a mobile data device can be very successful when you stay within a single usage market. You tailor both the phone features and the data features to the needs of that particular type of customer. But trying to converge two markets is an extremely risky idea, something mobile companies should avoid. The needs of the markets conflict, so there is an extremely high risk that you'll end up being cannibalized on either side by products designed specifically for the needs of single markets.
The communicator market is over-crowded and therefore risky. When you realize that the communicator market is only about 12% of the population, there are probably more communicator products shipping now than the market can support. Communicators are likely to face price pressure, and some of the products will probably sink like a stone. The RIM and Palm OS products are probably a little safer here because they have more unique features and loyal customer bases, and Nokia may do okay if it can add some differentiation. But Windows Mobile communicators are likely to be a happy market only for mobile companies that can live on commodity margins.
This is not a place where I'd be looking to build new devices, but many companies are introducing new communicators because they'd rather pursue an established market than build a new one.
The iPhone is not a Blackberry killer. One of the things I like about this chart is that it shows immediately why the iPhone is not a major threat to Blackberry sales. They're in very different markets. If RIM is hoping to move into the entertainment market with devices like the Pearl, iPhone definitely interferes with that. But the immediate impact of the iPhone is on the products closest to it, meaning Microsoft Zune and the SonyEricsson music phones.
If you don't fit in one of the segments, it's very hard to sell. One of the messages of the market segmentation is that people will pay extra for great solutions to the needs they have in a particular segment. If your product doesn't solve any of those problems, there's not a market for it. Many failures in the mobile data market have been products that focused on features rather than solving specific problems. They may be beloved by technophiles, but there aren't enough of those people to drive a lot of sales. See Nokia's 770 Internet tablet for a good example.
The biggest opportunity is in information management. This market is about the same size as the communicator market, but no major player is investing in it today. This segment is out of favor because of the decline in PDA sales, but remember that people thought the MP3 market was a backwater until Apple introduced the iPod. I can tell you from personal conversations, and the market research, that there's a substantial market here, and the people in it are very frustrated. I think the ideal product for this market would be a minitablet note-taker, which I refer to as an "info pad." You can read more about it here.
What about the middle of the chart?
The other segment we haven't discussed is the center of the chart, the place where information management, communication, and entertainment all come together. Some people like to think of this as the home of the ultimate converged device, and every now and then you'll see a hardware company try to tackle it.
They all fail.
In reality, the center of the chart is a market dead zone. To use the car analogy, designing a mobile data device for all three markets simultaneously is like trying to build a sports car that doubles as a minivan and a tractor. The result is not pretty, and won't be bought by anyone except gadget enthusiasts like me. Unfortunately, there aren't enough of us to make a significant market.
That's my view of the mobile data market. I'm sure other people have different perspectives; please post a comment and share yours.
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